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Nov 15, 2017

BlueGranite Partners with Profisee, a Leader in the MDM Gartner Magic Quadrant

BlueGranite is pleased to announce that it is now a Systems Integrator with Profisee to provide our clients with powerful Master Data Management (MDM) solutions. Profisee is a leader in the MDM technology space and is positioned as a rising niche player in the 2017 Gartner Magic Quadrant. The Profisee platform is a cloud and on-premises SQL Server based MDM solution that extends Microsoft’s out of the box Master Data Services (MDS) product to include enterprise MDM capabilities like:

Data Stewardship and Governance

Golden Record Management (GRM)

Data standardization and enrichment via integration with third party providers like Melissa, Loqate, Bing, and Google

Real-time bi-directional data integration

Event Management

Enterprise Workflow

Why Partner with Profisee?

BlueGranite is a trusted advisor for our clients around Microsoft’s Data Platform and Artificial Intelligence solutions in Azure and on-premises. Microsoft provides innovative technology for enabling BlueGranite to create powerful business solutions for our customers. Though Microsoft is a leader in the Corporate and Self-Service Business Intelligence (BI), Big Data, Analytics and Visualization, Machine Learning, and Internet of Things (IoT) software categories, there isn’t an enterprise offering that cleanses, enriches, and standardizes organizational master data. SQL Server’s MDS product provides some capabilities in this area, but the scope and scale of this tool is limited. BlueGranite has closed this feature gap with our Profisee partnership. By adding Profisee to our Microsoft toolset, BlueGranite can create better business solutions for our customers. Profisee’s powerful capabilities, coupled with SQL Server MDS, provide a true enterprise MDM solution.

Common Use Cases for Customer and Product Data

Two common MDM use cases are for the improvement of customer and product data. A description of the business needs and value created for these use cases is below.

Cleaning Customer Data to Maximize Lifetime Value

Cultivating rich and long-lasting relationships with customers is key to most organizational strategies. Successful organizations recognize that keeping existing customers is cheaper than finding new customers, and that increasing overall Customer Lifetime Value by even small percentages adds significantly to the bottom-line. This is proven by the popularity of programs like 360o View of the Customer, Customer Churn Reduction, “Customers who bought this also liked” Recommendation Engines, Inbound Marketing, or even Social Media Outreach programs. While the importance of customer data isn’t usually disputed, many organizations have issues with their customer data and don’t spend materially to fix the problem the right way. Some common issues are:

Duplication between different software platforms and those that aren’t fully integrated (CRM, ERP, Billing, Support, etc.)

Duplication due to churn and reacquisition of the customer or name/address changes

A lack of data ownership and process maturity for ensuring data quality

No capability to enrich customer data from outside data sources

The good news is that these issues are curable. BlueGranite, using the Profisee Platform, can create solutions to solve these problems. Data from source systems can be brought into Profisee to be cleansed and enriched with industry leading third party web services. Through this process, customer identities are verified, and names are corrected and standardized. In addition, customer addresses are also cleansed, corrected, and standardized. In many cases, the customer data is also enriched with missing information like latitude and longitude, email, phone number, area classifications, or demographic data. After cleansing, the data from different sources can be merged and matched with rich and high-performing fuzzy matching algorithms to remove duplication for creating consolidated customer master records (also known as golden records) that can be used for analytics (Business Intelligence, Visualization, and Artificial Intelligence) and the popular business programs mentioned above. Profisee also supports creating business rules on the customer data, enables user notifications, provides high-fidelity tools to interact with and edit customer data, and finally synchronizes the data back to the source system.

True Product Margin with a Consolidated Product Master

“How many products did I sell, and what is my product margin?” These are hard questions to answer for companies operating multiple ERP systems across several business units. Whether you’ve grown by acquisition or your company simply runs different software platforms, creating a consolidated Product/Item Master is an important task for measuring product performance and is usually a challenge for many organizations. Different ERP systems often have different item numbers, descriptions, SKUs, and configurations, and some do not keep track of vendor part numbers. Trying to consolidate/map them all for the first time can be daunting. An additional challenge exists in setting up the business processes for maintaining the consolidation over time and synchronizing the data across systems.

If you’re facing any of these challenges, BlueGranite can help. Using the Profisee platform, the data from different ERPs can be merged and matched with rich and high-performing fuzzy matching algorithms to link the same products between systems. Once the products are linked, rules can be implemented on the data to ensure that critical information is defined for each product. To make sure that the Product Master doesn’t get disconnected after your initial consolidation, Profisee provides real-time integration capabilities that keep all systems synchronized and clean. From a business process perspective, Profisee also provides the ability to create application workflows so that an approval process can be introduced to create new products for the organization.

With your consolidated Product Master in place, you can create meaningful, high-value analytics on product popularity and profitability, or even create machine learning solutions like demand forecasting, inventory stock-out prediction, or a product recommendation engine.

We are excited about our new Profisee partnership and the added value we can bring to our customers using this software. Profisee’s powerful capabilities, coupled with SQL Server MDS, provide a true enterprise MDM solution. Contact BlueGranite today to learn more about how to clean your customer, product, or other master data using the Profisee platform.

About The Author

Leo is a Solution Architect at BlueGranite. He has vast knowledge of the BI tool space and has extensive experience in self-service BI, performance management, OLAP, ETL, reporting and database methodologies.